A Weapon’s Serenade

Isha was very careful to not touch anything in the antiques store while still looking at every tiny thing. A dresser caught her attention in a major way.

“Hey… the thing you told me about how furniture and clothes and other stuff comes in mostly coherent styles?”

Anne nodded. “Yes?”

“There is more like this, right? And what do you call this style?”

Anne looked at the very rectangular dresser with fold-in handles and metal-reinforced corners. “Twentieth century British naval, if I am not mistaken. Not all types of furniture were made like this, just the stuff needed on ships about a hundred years ago.”

Isha chuckled. “What a cute thought that I felt drawn to the stuff humans put on ships.”

“That is quite the coincidence. Any reason you like it?”

“It feels sturdy and I like the colour of the wood and the brass. There is also this feeling of purpose and, I don’t know how to quite put it, something about it being worn and used makes it feel right for a home. Especially with the thought of it having been on a ship, it now being in a home after serving its purpose feels right.”

“I see where you’re coming from. Would this be a style you would want for your home?”

Isha crouched down to look at the dresser at eye-level. “Everything I have been offered has been enchanted to last eternally and never wear down.” She reached out to very gently touch a larger scratch in the wood. “It wouldn’t be right to make this dresser for me, it must be for someone else first and then find rest at my place.”

“Then I might have an idea. You could either pick up human-made furniture, originals, replicas, all the things in the same style, or you could ask our demon friends to make furniture like this, put it to good use on the chariots without the protective enchantment and then hand it to you when the time is right.”

“A mix of both could satisfy my need for actual use while also ensuring that I get all the furniture I actually need.”

“I remember reading about rich people or colonial staff using this type of furniture on the long journeys and then putting it into their, often temporary, homes in the colonies and then commissioning furniture in another but complementary style to fill the gaps in their inventory. You could do something similar.”

“These colonies were taken by force, right?”

“Yes. It was a… problematic time of European powers indulging in their military desires and thus subjugating others.”

“How strange possessions are as a concept then. This is an effigy of terror and yet it is beautiful. Made by someone to be used on a mission to subjugate in one way or another but it’s also a product of someone’s imagination. Even something that exists many times in the world, as I assume this does, I think it’s called mass produced or something, has been imagined by someone. Everything has worth that way, as creation. And creation contains inherent beauty.”

“This all sounds like you are no longer as sure if you like this.”

Isha got up again. “I still like this object as just a thing on its own, but its history is troubling. I am sure someone already thought about this moral dilemma and came to a reasonable conclusion. Right now, there is this almost ironic thought that I moved from my home by necessity assisted by a foreign force and now I desire the effigies of foreign subjugation.”

Anne ran her hand along the top of the dresser, stopping to circle around one of the brass corners with one finger. “The desk in the office of the head librarian has a glass corner. It’s on the right set of drawers when you see it from the door, just at the bottom of that side. When we were first invited into that office, Melody asked what happened to that corner. This wasn’t just any desk, as we would find out that day, it used to be Apollyon’s desk when she was the leader of Hell’s armies. A few years ago, a human group attacked the library, a bomb inside a briefcase had detonated right beside that desk. Kate didn’t care what the desk represented, didn’t care about the bombardment of Celestis Apollyon had ordered from that very desk, didn’t care about its history. She only cared that Apollyon had gifted it to her. The desk had been reconstructed after that attack, splinter by splinter, except this one corner that had been vaporized too thoroughly. It used to be the desk of the last general of Hell, the desk of the Destroyer, now it is the desk of the head librarian. History doesn’t end at the last atrocity committed.”

“So, this dresser, the dresser of, I don’t know, captain George the relentless who hunted down dissenters in the colonies does not need to remain the dresser of George the relentless, it could become the dresser of Isha the scholar. It will then be both.”

“Yes, it just needs a moment where it being the dresser of Isha the scholar becomes more defining than it being the dresser of George the relentless. Kate’s desk has taken a far more important scar than it ever took before being the desk of the head librarian. That made it truly hers.”

“And that is a moment one cannot force. I suppose getting this furniture from human sources would make me a collector of stories.” Isha smiled in amusement. “An orator of furniture, just that I don’t even know the history of anything I own. We might never know who this dresser was made for and what adventures it saw. That knowledge is likely lost to time. Only these items remember, every single one of them here in this store, they all remember silent stories.”

Anne smiled. “Not as much effigies but witnesses.”

“You’re right. They become effigies if we demand it. Too much blood and the demand is too loud to ignore and the witness becomes complicit. Let captain George wipe out a tribe and his dresser becomes a piece of his brutality, a memory of horrors. If captain George just studies the wildlife, it becomes a witness of curiosity and wonder. A century later and it is silent. The scars are there, the memory is there but it refuses to speak. Those memories are only for it to know.”

Anne nodded slowly. “And it will remember more. Stories that are yet to be written by whoever buys it, maybe children will play on it, maybe someone will spill water on it and it leaves a mark. All those stories will be remembered even when the people who made them are long gone.”

Isha looked down at the dresser with a rather solemn expression before bursting into laughter. “It’s a dresser. It’s just a dresser.” She shook her head. “How empty the world is when this is just a dresser. Its story is not mine. What I need is to create memories based on, well, me.”

“I take it that means you are going for the handmade demonic furniture?”

“Yes, I will take my time though. There are so many things I have yet to learn about living like a demon and what I actually want in a home. Big me should fit somewhere too and that is all every complicated. I still want one memory from here though.”

Anne raised an eyebrow. “Found a small memory then?”

“Not that small. Behind you, on the table.”

The young human turned around. “The box?”

“Yes, the box.” It was a beautiful box with different wooden inlays and little metal latch keeping it closed.

“That is a nice box. I wonder if it’s a box for whatever or specifically for jewellery.”

“We can find out.” Isha stepped around the various other furniture in the antiques shop to reach the box and open it carefully. “Would a jewellery box have special insides?”

“Yes.”

“This doesn’t have anything inside, it’s just a box.”

“Still want it?”

“I do, it is a nice box after all, even if it were just a box and not one with memories.”

 “And now it’s going to be the box of Isha the scholar, making new memories. Does it have a price tag?”

“There is a paper inside with a strange symbol and the number twenty-five.”

“I see. I will give it some memories then. I’ll pay for it, as a little gift for you.”

Isha blushed a little. “Oh, thank you. You really don’t have to, I was told I don’t really have to stick to a budget. I should just get what I really feel like buying.”

“I know but this way it becomes a little more meaningful. It’s a box with memories and we have just added to them. A box with a memory of yours already.”

“I love that. Thank you.”

“My pleasure. Let’s go pay for the box and see what the others have found, shall we?”